Summary
Bryan Stevenson is a civic activist and writer with a long history of training and practice as a lawyer. His book “Just Mercy” is the result of philosophical and humanistic aspirations, which he sought to turn into practical benefit for America’s vulnerable classes. The book captures the experience of a maturing lawyer and activist seeking to get people to show understanding and compassion for people stigmatized by society as criminals because of their race or ethnicity.
Author Background
Stevenson grew up in a low-income environment and felt disadvantaged by many classes of the American population. He focuses on issues of race and justice, largely untouched during his time as a lawyer. Stevenson is also the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which advocates for equal rights before the law. He also holds a professorship and teaches law at the university.
Stevenson practiced in an environment where racial difference was perceived as a sign of probable criminal involvement. It was a criminal system in which the presumption of guilt worked against African Americans and Hispanics. In the introduction to his book, Stevenson expresses concern that, since the 1980s, America has become a country that has not only developed a prison system but also realized the nation’s dark desire to be more strict and punishing towards each other (2015). Stevenson found himself in a criminal justice system that was inhumane and intolerant, made mistakes, and was prejudicially cruel.
Book Synopsis
The book opens with a description of Stevenson’s first significant experience as a lawyer, which influenced his life. He interacted with a man on death row who evoked a lot of empathy in him. Stevenson saw in the condemned a living person, which most Americans are not inclined to do, showing an exceptional lack of sympathy for criminals (Stevenson, 2015). This is one of the book’s main ideas, providing its profound pathos. The civilian population is quite prone to excluding people accused of a crime from society, and this cruelty leads to a dizzying number of cruel and sometimes unreasonable sentences.
Stevenson struggles with this injustice and racial and class prejudice, which occupy the central part of the book. The book describes cases of unjust sentences due to public opinion. One of the chapters of the book describes the story of a black man unjustly convicted of the murder of a girl. Stevenson points out that the indictment was influenced by old prejudices about racial segregation that have plagued America for over a hundred years.
Stevenson realized his innocence from the very first conversation with the convict, but the judicial system sought to create his portrait as a hazardous person. This was because the condemned man had an affair with a white-skinned young woman. Interracial ties have been perceived in South America since ancient times as vicious and unacceptable, and this prejudice was reflected in the conviction and sentence to death of the defendant.
Stevenson notes that such cases demonstrate hopelessness and despair in the face of a system based on errors and injustices. Stevenson tries to see his clients as individuals, empathizes with them, and tries to understand their personal history. This distinguishes Stevenson as a lawyer, making him a human rights worker who seeks not to condemn but to appeal to mercy.
Key Takeaways
Humanity and compassion are the book’s central themes, the ideas the author calls to embody. Stevenson believes that American society is immune to the suffering of others and is more eager to demonstrate its toughness and severity than to show compassion. As a result, unfairly cruel sentences are handed down to various people.
Stevenson (2015) cites the fact that many children under 12 receive life sentences and are doomed to die in prison. Against such a punishing mentality, Stevenson strives to find humanity in the condemned and appeals to compassion, which is the basis of a better, healthier society for him. Stevenson is incredibly selfless in his work – an important scene where it is described that he constantly talks on the phone with one of his sentenced charges, just so that he knows that there is someone who cares about him.
Stevenson is a strong lawyer with a big heart, a profound philosopher, and a subtle critic of American national identity. The problem of race for Stevenson is not that white Americans enslaved blacks, but a problem of a less material and more abstract nature. The American people tend to build a patriotic narrative of racial or national superiority that has been sluggishly maintained today (Sharples, 2020). The nation’s desire for pride and a sense of self-righteousness leads to a certain blindness of the justice system, which closes its eyes to the obvious truths about its serious shortcomings.
This is one of the book’s main ideas, demonstrating the need for humanistic initiatives in the country. The book tries to change the established attitude towards criminals as dehumanized aliens who do not deserve sympathy. Stevenson combats this inhumanity by explaining it as a collectively built system that is the product of an injustice rooted in American history.
This injustice, in particular to blacks, is connected with the need for enslavers to explain to themselves their infallibility by portraying blacks as not quite human (Davis, 2020). It is this dehumanization of racial minorities that persists in the justice system, as shown by numerous cases where a black person was charged with a crime purely to close a problematic case. Stevenson argues that slavery was not abolished, and evolved into a penal system that was intolerant and biased towards non-white Americans.
Likes and Dislikes
An important positive characteristic of the book is the author’s historical and cultural awareness. Stevenson is a man deeply aware of the trauma of African Americans, which has passed through generations and transformed in connection with the evolution of the American state system. The author does not hesitate to make excursions into America’s historical past, discovering unpleasant precedents that cannot be ignored.
The only real downside to the book is that it can be hard to read due to the substantial emotional impact of real-life stories. The facts described in the book can have a devastating impression on the reader because they show how people can lose their humanity based on the postulates of retribution and not compassion. However, the book is not written to demonstrate the evil nature of the whole nation; Stevenson demonstrates how this can be fought with warmth and humanity. The book demonstrates the possibility of hope in the face of the judicial machine but also shows the spiritual danger that the American nation faces if it focuses on the politics of punishment.
References
Davis, P. E. (2020). Painful legacy of historical African American culture. Journal of Black Studies, 51(2), 128-146.
Sharples, J. T. (2020). The world that fear made: Slave revolts and conspiracy scares in early America. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stevenson, B. (2015). Just mercy: A story of justice and redemption. One World.